Aftermath
by Willow-wode
Summary: The four hobbits each come to terms with awakening after Mordor
1. Merry

MERRY  
  
  
  
Dusk-the first day  
  
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I watched them take you down from the backs of the eagles, and I knew then that you were both going to die.  
  
There was no way you could possibly survive.  
  
I stood off to one side, numb past all bearing, and watched as Gandalf took Frodo from Gwaihir. I watched as Aragorn touched Frodo's face, his eyes shimmering like jewels, then turned away and reached up, pulled Sam into his arms as if he were a feather from the eagle's shoulder, held him desperately close. Sam just squinted up at him, tried to speak then fainted dead away. Frodo pulled from his stupor to fixate upon the white being holding him, clutching to Gandalf with one bloodied, swollen hand from which the ring finger was gone...  
  
My stomach clenched, revolted. I spun from it all and ran. Ran. I still had trouble walking with any strength yet I vaulted several flights of stairs before pain and reflex took over and I fell to my knees and heaved what was left of my breakfast onto the third-story landing.  
  
And now, here I crouch, no longer panic-stricken yet cowering beneath the enormity of it all. First Pippin. oh, Pippin! Now Frodo, and Sam...  
  
Will I be the only one of us left?  
  
I fall onto my side, gasping and gagging, and roll onto my back as my injured sword arm clenches stiffly against unforgiving rock. The stench of panic, of sweat and vomit and old, damp stone fills my nostrils, almost making me sick again. But I fight it, gritting my teeth and clenching my lips and taking deep pulls of air through my half-clogged nostrils. Tears leak from my eyes, over my temples and into my hair as I lie here shaking, eyes wide open. For when I shut my eyes I see it all too plainly; details that I refused as I ran.  
  
How gaunt they were. Sam, a pale, shrunken copy of his former, robust self- I remember him as all shaded umber and brightest, bronzed gold, round and soft yet solid and firm as the very earth, strapping arms and a broad back that could shoulder almost anything, his heart even mightier than his frame. And Frodo-once cinnamon-dusted ivory, dark russet curls, a warm autumn's promise of cool winter and always whipcord slender, never enough proper flesh on him at the best of times-I could all but hear his bones rattle as Gandalf had picked him up. Both of them, filthy and battered, tattered and... small. So small, held with the care and tenderness of fragile porcelain by the men who'd carried them. And Frodo's hand...  
  
I feel sickened once more; instead I focus on the ceiling above me, on the vast, intricate woven arch of chiseled white stone. It is incredibly beautiful, an amazing thing certainly to a hobbit who has spent his life with simpler architectures of earth, with wood and uncarved rock and low, comforting ceilings. But it nevertheless does not erase the memory of that horror-that mangled, bloody thing that used to be my cousin's fair, freckled hand. There was a callous upon that finger that no longer exists, risen and rubbed into place by too many pens held against it, a permanent ink-stain coloring it slightly darker than his flesh. You could tell so much about Frodo by just looking at his hands. And now they tell me even more. This signature of his being is all ruined and twisted, not only by the physical reality of such a wound, but what it means. What it *means*...  
  
It means that he was wearing that dreadful thing in the midst of its evil birthplace. It means that he didn't want to take it off. It means that something-someone!-had to take it from him.  
  
Ah, Sam! How did you bear it? Your own hands have their tale to tell: sinewy and strong, hands which would without remorse and with immense practicality destroy a weed or stab tools into the rich earth. Those hands would have not have found it so easy to perform such delicate necessity upon your master's flesh. It would have been easier for you to strike off your own hand than to take anything from Frodo's. Was he so far gone? Did he fight against you? But how could he have? There was nothing left of him, Sam! He would have been no match for you; never was. In all the wrestling matches we engaged in as children, he never gave up the humorous hope of besting you-but then he never won, either. How could he have fought you, as frail and fragile as he's become?  
  
Did you *both* go mad from the pull of that cursed Ring? Did you try to take it from him? Did it give him some kind of furious strength and so you engaged in a sickened, possessive struggle? Did you writhe in the rubble of hopeful dreams that Mordor had turned to nightmare-chasing malignancy until there was nothing left but rage and despair and the necessity of cutting it away before it destroyed you both?  
  
But it has destroyed you both, I fear. And if you live, will I even know you anymore?  
  
My thoughts choke me; air thumps painfully in my still-healing side and I continue to stare wide-eyed and tear-spasmed, at the ceiling. I am surprised that it does not shudder, move, come spinning down about me-for surely my world is doing so. The only constants I have known in life are slipping from my grasp, but one thing remains and wounds me deeper than I think even the Witch King's breath.  
  
Sam, I would have done the same thing. Without hesitation. If I had seen evil gain hold of Frodo, I would have cut it from him without a qualm. More-and my heart clenches within my breast--I would have killed him outright had I seen him taken so, seen evil reshape and twist into vile servitude his gentle, earnest spirit. For there are worse things than death...  
  
So who now has changed? I talk so blithely of murdering my own cousin and in another breath wonder that I will not know you both? More likely that you will not know *me*.  
  
I groan and lurch upward, hands to my face, and frantically try to wipe the assumptions from my gaze. I don't know any of it-I don't know what happened. It's just my own bleakness, an umbra of despair that has walked hand in hand with me this past sevenday and I cannot seem to halt it. I should not just blindly envision these things. Not while their lives hang by such a thin, fragile wire...  
  
But I do. I sit in the dark recesses of the stairwell and I realize that the only hope that I shall be set free of all this lies as still, as near death as Frodo and Sam. My breath heaves within me with such violence I wonder I do not burst from it. I keep my hands over my eyes, feel the scar upon my forehead throb and burn with my heartbeat. I cannot bear it. I cannot bear it any more...  
  
Pippin, I need you. Stars, but I need you! I want you to smile at me, hold me, remind me by your mere presence and breath and being that there is sweet-hot illumination behind all these shades that wind themselves about me. I want to hear your voice lift high and plaintive in question or low and murmuring against my ear, your Tuckborough accent a lilting, sweet reminder of new-mown, warm grass and crystalline waters and brilliant sunlight.  
  
I want to feel the pain of living again! I am undermined by the quiet emptiness of all this dying...  
  
Even you. I never thought that one so heedlessly bright could be suborned into shadow, but it lies along you, shroud and terminus. Crushed as surely as Theoden, but at least his end was quick. I saw him to his death; no doubt I shall see you to yours. Until then your enormous will betrays you, keeps you struggling against that most final of questions, keeps you entrapped in a deep well of pain that I cannot pull you from. I've tried- oh, how I've tried! I've sat by you, spoken with you, implored and demanded, yet you will not hear me. The shadow has all but eclipsed you, taking revenge upon you for your ability to hold it so at bay. And suddenly I wonder if by my own darken presence I but enfold you deeper in it.  
  
The deeps rise before my shut eyelids; I lower my hands slowly, force open my eyes, stare down the cavernous stair. But still it cannot erase the memory of you lying in that wide, white sickbed...  
  
Once you were sunny and sharp: dappled bronze curls, summer-gold running along your skin, vivid prisms in your eyes. Small and lithe, your body quick as your thoughts, your nerves traced along tensile moments, reflections of the keen intellect and instinct within. But those brilliant reflections lay quiescent, now, dulled and muted. Your narrow-angled face is made even moreso by confinement and fever, with scrapes and bruises that I count every hour to see if they have by some miracle vanished; your sharp nose blunted and broken, your sharper eyes sunken, blackened, closed. Your hands, miraculously untouched, browned and slender and toughened by the sword, are all I dare to hold of you. Your body is no longer that of a half-grown 'tweener but lengthened from the ent-draught even as my own, thin and hard from battle and journeying, all gangliness gone. One leg lies twisted and blocked into place; your ribs are bandaged tautly so that I no longer hear the grind and creak of shattered bone, yet they must be but poorly knitted for when the healers come in to tend you, you moan and quiver. Wherever you have mercifully escaped to, you still feel pain.  
  
I heard Aragorn speaking to the healers. He said when you thought me dead, when you thought Frodo and Sam in the clutches of the Black Tower, you rode into battle with flat eyes and a dead heart. That you no longer cared. That something within you had stilled, that some light had gone out. That he feared it had broken you past mending.  
  
And since then I have rarely left your side, talking to you sometimes in murmurs, sometimes in hoarse entreaty: I'm here. I'm here, Pippin. Wherever you are, please come back...  
  
I curl about my knees, rocking in the dimness of the landing, closing my eyes. I want to see it, this time. I *want* these memories:  
  
Apples in the basket, rose and gold and green. All of us in the orchards, readying the harvest for the vats and you hiding the tiny, sweet ones in your pockets and the wilding glimmer in your eyes as you lock me into complicity with one daring glance...  
  
Swimming in the Brandywine, brown and lithe and graceful as the otters we found on the bank-otters amazingly outswam as the female chased you from her babies with tiny growls and large teeth. How I just watched you speed by and she turned on me, bit me in the knee...  
  
Cheeks flushed with too much sun, too much dancing and too much hard cider as you and the harvesting lasted into the night to meet the dawn. I gave up trying to keep up with you, though there were a lot of pretty girls who did...  
  
So many memories. Most of them encompassing you. Bright as a shaft of sunlight, piercing me to marrow, then twisting and gutting and emptying me at the thought of life without you.  
  
And another one: all four of us-impossibly young but you the youngest of all-sprawled on the roof at Bag End. Sam on his belly digging meticulously in the dirt, Frodo's head pillowed on Sam's rear as he stares sleepily up into the sky, me leaning against Frodo's upthrust knees and watching with a growing smile on my lips as you simply refuse to sit still: bending straight-legged over Sam to find out what treasures he might have miraculously mined in one inch of earth, trying to get Frodo's attention and failing then sitting practically on his head to gain it, crawling into my lap and asking questions of me so complex that I still can't believe they came out of your mouth and mind.  
  
You were so young. You were so old. You were always, always there. We knew, all of us, that you would always *be* there. It was impossible to imagine otherwise.  
  
But now I must imagine it. I must walk with it in the dawn, lie with it in the gloom. Pippin, you lie so close to death, and Sam, and Frodo...  
  
No. *No*.  
  
Where can I go when there is nowhere left to turn?  
  
And I can't even begin to comprehend the possibility that, of those four laughing hobbit children, of those little boys who were so fiercely and uncompromisingly alive, only I shall remain. 


	2. Pippin

PIPPIN  
  
Mid-night-the sixteenth day.  
  
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I couldn't make you laugh today.  
  
It used to be so easy. I used to be so good at it. No, I must still be good at it, because the others of our company pay tribute to my ability.  
  
I cannot laugh myself, for bound and cracked ribs aren't standing easy beneath the convulsions of laughter. 'Tis hard enough to walk, let alone to express mirth. But that does not stop me trying to gain it from others.  
  
I couldn't make you laugh, Frodo, and this failure somehow haunts me more than any other counted and carried this past year. It used to come so readily to you, it did. Even when I was a child, and you a well meaning 'tweenager trying to somehow steer my erratic footsteps. Even when you were furious with me, more often than not I could diffuse your anger with a quick, well-chosen phrase. It would burst from your chest almost unwillingly, the laugh, and then you'd turn quickly away, growling and muttering because you'd lessened that stern face with a laugh that I, supposedly the one in trouble, had forced upon you.  
  
But now the ready smile is gone and you stand by the window, a wraith-no! No, not a wraith, never that-but nonetheless a pale shadow of yourself, looking outward to the mountain where you and Sam were found, waiting to die and indeed more dead than alive. You don't even know I'm still here, watching you from the doorway. You seem so small, and lost. So *old*, with touches of winter in your dark hair and your eyes bleeding emptiness and your face sucked dry and hollow...  
  
I wonder if you will ever laugh again.  
  
Sam laughed today-that is, he did until he saw that you did not, and the sound drained from his chest and the expression slid from his face. He reached out to touch your hand, so worried by your lack of response that he didn't see how you flinched, ever so slightly. I'm glad he did not-t'would have hurt him, and I saw that you also realized this, for you controlled it so quickly that for moments I wondered if I had even seen it.  
  
Sam. He sleeps now-the dead sleep of one pushed past endurance. For now that you're safe, cousin, he can. This room, this huge, tapestried, sumptuous suite fit for a King-or a Ringbearer-is now Sam's haven. He's barely left it save to go down to the gardens on still-shaky legs to sit in the sun. He can let down, give in; he can release, a little, the incredible endurance mustered to see you through. If I know him at all, he gave up what food there was to you, would have picked you up when you fell, would have carried you on his back if it proved necessary, and so now he must pay the harshest price in physical recovery. It breaks my heart to see him so weak. Sam was the strongest of all of us, most likely could have broken me in two with one hand and now that I think back, probably longed to more than once.  
  
But your strength doesn't just lie in your frame, does it, Sam? I watch you sleeping so, and your face is slack, touched with peace. So sure. It's done, what you set out to do. Your heart never wavered, did it? Somehow you've come through this, if not whole, at least sound. Yes, there is a shadow in your clear eyes and what remains of your strength is a mockery of what it was, however you are still Samwise Gamgee and you always will be, no matter what. Always there, always shining through to the end. Diminished physically, but not within.  
  
Both of you, grown smaller with starvation and a journey you can't even yet bear to speak fully of. Whilst Merry and I stand a full head above even Sam, and he is not short amongst hobbits.  
  
See, Frodo? I've finally grown taller than you, courtesy of our Entish friends. You can no longer be calling me 'Pipsqueak', can you?  
  
But I wish you would. I wish you'd stop looking out that damned window into the darkness and turn to me, look at me-truly *look* at me with that patent exasperation that I could turn so easily to a grin. You were putty in my hands, cousin, yet I knew even as a child that I hadn't the nerve to push it too far. Soft you were, but there was a tough, hard-learned self- possession beneath the kindness, an adamant core to you that few cared to witness. They saw only eccentric, dreamy-eyed Frodo, with his books and his ink-stained fingers and his seemingly uncharacteristic bursts of wildness and his penchant for strange things like lying out nights and gazing at stars.  
  
I think, looking at the back of you now, that rigid center is all that kept you alive. That and Sam, with his strong back and his huge heart and his careful, pruning touch. And I wonder, suddenly, if that was a kindness...  
  
Tears spring in my eyes; I dash them away and turn from the room, find escape in the nightfallen corridors of the King's tower. Closeted in style we are, yet here I slink, limping along the hallways like a thief. Like a fool.  
  
And like a fool, my path is unchangeable. I stop before the room where he has sensibly gone to sleep. It too is appointed to fit its resident: a hero of Pellennor and a Knight of the Mark. Why they put us in separate rooms and Frodo and Sam in one is a puzzle I am not up to this night; but I have spent more nights in here than in my own room, anyway. I'm the one who wanders the halls despite my unhealed frame, torturing myself with not only the pain of my body, but also the pain of my dearest ones.  
  
Oh, Merry. At least you can still laugh. But it has changed-oh, it has so changed...  
  
You lie quietly captured in sleep, tousled and boyish, seemingly unhampered by all of what has happened. I limp over slowly, longing to touch you, to prove to myself that yes, you are still here. There was a time you know, not too long ago, when I feared you would not be here and I still walk in terror of it. Would that I could just curl up next to you and sleep the night away with your breathing as my lullaby, but my own injuries will not permit me crawling in next to you without some effort, and I would not rob you of sleep as well. I cringe as I set my knees to the stool at your side, shield my pain in the feel of your hair in my fingers where it lies curled along the bedclothes. You still sleep propped upon many pillows- your own injuries haven't quite healed despite what you'd have us all believe. I slide my hand down to your sword-arm, and yet again feel silent relief that it has warmth and feeling, that it does not lie silent and spellbindingly cold. I'm so close I can breathe your breath, smell the sweetness of the sleeping draught that the healers have succeeded in giving you and which I poured into the gutter outside when they thought to give one to me, and suddenly the tears that I was able to be holding back from Frodo, from Sam, come rising out of me, a great, bitter torrent. I curl about it, almost fall against you but push away just in time. I should have known. I've never been able to hide anything from you, Merry.  
  
Oh, everything, everyone has changed! Everyone save I. Oh yes, on the outside I am bigger, but on the inside ragged down, lessened with the battle. They say I nearly died, which is hard to fathom. I used to say as a child that I would live forever, and I think I somehow came to believe it. So much that I don't rightly remember how close I came to death. It simply didn't occur to me. Merry, the only way I knew that I was almost gone was the look in your eyes when I awoke and you were there!  
  
I can only imagine what you felt. I know what I felt, when you lay stricken and near death, half of your body useless and your mind sucked into the deeps from your attack upon the Witch King. I remember finding you, wandering the hallways half-delirious, forgotten by everyone save me. I remember that you simply peered at me, and how those same lovely, devious eyes that had cajoled me both into and out of trouble were so strangely puzzled, turned inward. How the blue within your eyes was muted, half- swallowed by black, and you asked me quite reasonably if I had come to bury you.  
  
How I watched in disbelief as that blackness swallowed your gaze and you collapsed. How my mind went blank and I too collapsed-I fell upon you there in the dark hallway and beat my fists against your breast and shrilled your name and demanded that you stay, just stay. We were somehow one in that moment and I could sense it all within you: the petrification and the pain and the overwhelming desire to just keep turning inward, to go within until there was nothing left and leave behind the knowledge of that horrific shadow that had eclipsed the light in your eyes...  
  
I sensed it, somehow, that you were going to die. I sensed that you had chosen to die.  
  
I stifle my sobs against my arms; bite down on fabric and my own flesh as I frantically try to halt the awareness I did not ask for. I turn away, even as I did then. My ribcage twists and knots with agony, yet it is nothing compared to the remembrance of what I felt when I thought you were dying. When I decided that I would not let you leave me, that you needed me to light your way into the halls of the dead. When I decided that if I were to bury anyone, it would be the both of us.  
  
You were always there, you see. Merry, I truly cannot remember a time when you weren't. From my childhood until now we were apart only when the constraints of family and distance between our homes separated us. I cannot begin to comprehend life without you. And when I thought you dead, when I thought Frodo and Sam captured and in the black tower...  
  
There was nothing left. There was nothing left of *me*.  
  
I still writhe with it.  
  
Imagine it, Merry. To realize that there is nothing to you but what you have been gifted by the presence of others. To realize that your life is so entwined with another's-indeed with three others-that you cannot exist without them.  
  
I was like Frodo, for a matter of days. It terrifies me, Merry. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to walk through the rest of my life with empty eyes and a maimed heart. I don't want to be as lost as he. But I was. When that troll fell on me and all but crushed the life out of me I was quite accepting of it, Merry. I was *glad*.  
  
But now we're alive and I cannot be but glad of that as well. We're all alive. But the fear still takes me, you see. The memory of the emptiness haunts me. I can't stop remembering it, can't stop reliving it. Merry, you and Sam, you've found yourselves, somehow. You've found your strength and will to go on. But when I thought you gone it was taken from me. Frodo's lost his soul, and I...  
  
I've lost my self.  
  
And I sit here and wonder if it was ever there.  
  
We're alive. All of us. Against all odds, we have survived. And we'll return to the Shire-return home. You, Merry, will have the Mastery of Buckland waiting, and will no doubt marry that fine, fat wife you always wanted and have enough children to fill the Hall with japes and warmth and laughter. Sam will return to the land and be comforted by his never- ending, wondrous compulsion to take care of whatever needs caring for, be it flowers or trees or Frodo. Frodo will burrow away from the light he can no longer bear and disappear into either Crickhollow or Bag End and finish Bilbo's book and hopefully-though I doubt it-learn to laugh again. And I?  
  
I'm not even of age in the Shire. I'm still an irresponsible 'tween-callow and fun loving and all those things youth is supposed to be and I manage to embody so well. But regardless of what's expected of me, I'm not that child anymore and the pretense grows weary and cold. The armor of Gondor, so heavy before, is now but a light burden compared to that I must wear once returning home. Far too much blood has been spilled-not only that which I've personally let, but my own and that of those who help make of me what small definition of self I have. The shining mail of youthful expectation no longer fits this changed body. This changed heart.  
  
Life and joy-they betray me yet they are what I have left. Those two things... and you.  
  
And as I lean against your place of slumber, crushing my bruised face into your bed and clutching your sheets in my hands, the stifled wail contorts and transforms and I laugh, because it is either laugh and bear the pain of crushed ribs, or cry and bear the pain that rises from that, the emptiness and wonder and bewilderment that shakes me with the thoughts of what road I must take from this moment forward.  
  
'Tis such a little thing to change the heart: a smile, the laughter that follows.  
  
And 'tis such a little thing to change so many lives: a Ring. 


	3. Frodo

FRODO  
  
Sunrise-the seventeenth day  
  
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Dawn shimmers, rising against the White Tower. Brilliant and hard, it makes the promise that no matter what, the sun is a constant. It will always rise.  
  
Though that promise is empty. For, not too long ago, there was a dawnless day.  
  
That is the last thing I remember with any sort of clarity. Everything is so scattered, my sensibilities lying about me in fragments. I pick up one, then the other, like shards of a broken, twisted mirror, ghostly mnemonics of things I can hardly bear to remember. The dawn illuminates them, piece by piece: darkling flashes, blinding sparks. Blinding.  
  
I turn from the light with weakened, watering eyes and take shelter in the gloom of the chamber, in the faint illumination of one bare candle. The light can no longer sustain me, and I am now both in awe and terror of the darkness-instead I almost frantically turn my gaze to the only source of comfort I have come to know. But even that eludes me. I watch Sam as he sleeps, yet the normal solace of his presence does not fill me. I watch him breathe, softly deep, and my own seizes in my breast. I watch him drift through tranquil, liquid dreams while I lean, crippled and heavy against the window frame, my back to the light, the morning breeze lifting my scorched hair, my nonexistent finger throbbing from a fatal blow, my soul lying stillborn in my maimed hand.  
  
There is such lovely, careless ease in your face, Sam. Such peace. It belies the physical truths: your sunken, thin face, your wheaten curls lying bleached and lank along your skull, your body wasted and your skin sallowed, mottled with cuts, gashes, bruises. All of it healing, fading. I don't think I gave you any of those. I hope I didn't. If so, you've never said, and never will. You've spent your strength in a righteous battle, and there is nothing more to speak of. Nothing more to think upon. Only rest, and recovery. The journey done, the Ring undone, nothing but the homeward return ahead.  
  
Keep your innocence. I don't wish that you should also lose that for me. Sleep, now. Just sleep.  
  
I cannot sleep. When I fall sleep the darkness comes and with it comes the spiraling down into the void left within my mind, a gaping, shattered chasm that once held my will. Then the tremors come, so fierce that they rattle me awake-my body's denial, survival instinct beyond sense, nothing more. Then, as I waken, the sickness of mental and physical at odds claims me. It happens, again and again. Sleep is no refuge for me, not any more.  
  
The healers all nod knowingly as this ague weakens me down. They try to argue me into taking medications to help me sleep-they do not seem to understand when I tell them I don't want to be rendered so helpless within my own mind. They think I'm still in shock. To lose part of one's body is a massive stress to the system, you must understand.  
  
And what of it when you lose part of your soul? They have no answer for that, do they?  
  
They all think you had to take it from me, you know. They see the marks upon us both and their eyes fall to my mangled hand and their thoughts are plain: that you were forced to strike it from me. I went mad and would not cast it in. I tried to strangle you, left marks upon your throat. A choked cry for forgiveness, the rise upward and glitter downward of Sting, a ragged wound left behind because I struggled and you had to overpower me, hold me down, sever it uncleanly. There is no blame in their gazes, no. Only awe. Only pity. They wrap my hand gently and speak softly.  
  
I can hardly bear to have them touch me.  
  
For at the heart of it they're right. I did go mad. That shard of memory holds hard and bright, the dawn exposing it with radiant clarity. I remember standing on the edge of the Sammath Naur and sanity snapping within me like too-taut wire. I remember some remaining part of my soul screaming denial, cast and flung aside like an empty, tattered garment as my mind and body refused to deny the Ring, as I held it up and placed it on my finger and...  
  
For a moment, it was all I had ever wanted. All I'd ever dreamed. Can you understand, Sam? Would you understand if I tried to explain, or would revulsion fill you, turn you from me?  
  
Imagine it, holding the world in the palm of your hand. To feel everything. *Everything*. To have senses sharper than any wild beast, to have such promise and power take you, to be filled with starlight so brilliant and darkness so vast that you choke and stagger and nearly explode with it.  
  
Then to be ripped from it; to be blinded, deafened and maimed, all in one razored blow of Gollum's vengeful teeth. The ripping of flesh, the crunching of bone, the stretch and snap of sinew and tendons. The rending of my mind, the tearing away of... *something* which my hand only thinly echoes. The screams-mine, or the Ring's?-as I felt it fall, felt it flare. Felt it *die*.  
  
The indescribable benediction as I was dropped back into myself. Past madness, from hell, into a barren cocoon of nothingness, pure relief.  
  
Had Gollum not taken it from me, had you been forced to use your sword to take it from me-indeed had you been forced to chop off my whole hand to save me and yourself and the entirety of Middle Earth I would not have begrudged it of you. I only wish that within this imagined scenario, the blade would have slipped higher, snagged the thickness of an artery and I could have fallen to the ground, stinging and weary and weakened and just gone to sleep...  
  
Or that Gollum would have dragged me with him into the fires of Doom.  
  
I can still feel it, the despair as it died. The exhilaration as I was set free. Now, however I realize that too was a lie. I am not free. I no longer have it... but it still has me.  
  
But you cannot know this and I will never tell you.  
  
Pippin knows. I see his eyes searching mine, looking for answers I do not have, looking for hope that I cannot give. My wild, little cousin-little no more but nigh unto the height of old Bullroarer!-with his brilliant, golden gaze and his tangled, bronze mop softening a clever, passionate face gone slightly wrong, somehow. He still limps from his own brush with death; occasionally pain is still behind those shining eyes: pain, and fear. He is afraid when he looks at me. He sees what I've become. I want to tell him it's all right, tell him a shining story of happy endings and love regained just as I used to when he was little and bedtime was imminent. But it is far too late for that. Pippin may still be a child by Shire law, but by any other rule he is no longer that. He now knows a world vaster than he had ever dreamed of seeing. He has seen his youthful gods and idols betray themselves, and the knowledge may bring a taste of bitterness, yet his heart is too great to fail him. He is so strong, stronger than he himself knows. He will not merely survive, he will *live*.  
  
Merry knows. He too has grown taller than any Bucklander in memory. He has far surpassed me, this cousin of mine with his hard frame and his quicksilver presence and the vastdeep of his gaze. At first those unfathomable eyes stared with agonizing disquiet at my hand, but Sam must have told him what truly transpired and he now looks at me with an understanding that is even more haunting. Once I was the older cousin, the stronger, the one who protected him; now he thinks to raise a shelter for all of us to cling to but I cannot. I shall not. For he too has had his own bleak night, my serene, outrageous Meriadoc-he has outlasted his own struggle against a darkling current that would have drowned anyone else. I tangled with the Wraiths' liege with much less success, and the fact that Merry survived to walk and breathe normally speaks of what he has become. He is a warrior, now, a knight, and the deep despair that nearly killed him has instead taken him within and stilled him.  
  
My two younger cousins. I saw you both born-when did you get so much older than I? I envy you your strength. And when I feel anything, I feel shame. What you've endured, you've borne for me. The Ring has not only shattered me, but also bent your malleable hearts nigh to breaking.  
  
Gandalf knows. It was two nights ago now, long after the festivities had ended and Merry and Pippin had left us and you had fallen asleep, he sat with me. Another shard that flickers with intolerable light is the memory of him taking me down from the eagle's back, murmuring my name, tears glistening whiter than the diamond radiance that surrounded him. I remember clinging to him dizzily, thinking that it must be a dream or I must be dead until I saw how my hand left a swath of blood along the brilliant whiteness of his robe. And I realized that we were both alive and I started to sob and couldn't stop and I understand that they had to drug me insensate to pry me away from him.  
  
My blood no longer stains his robe, yet I still find it hard to meet his eyes. He knows why. He understands. He senses my mind unraveling, skein by skein, even as I sense his undying sorrow that he gave cause for my fragile world to be destroyed.  
  
He knows that I still walk in the black lands. That I most likely always will, now.  
  
I never meant for it to go this far. I never mean that life's taste, once so hotly sweet, would turn to bile and ashes. I only meant to stay a while in this penumbra of pain, not to be swallowed and suborned. I never thought that I would actually have the strength to survive this journey. But our will, even broken, betrays us-and it seems dying is all too easy when you've spent nearly an entire year of your life both besieged by and defending the battlements of your own selfhood.  
  
In living is the paradox, living with this shattered mosaic of remembrance...  
  
And the fingers of my unmaimed hand clench into the wooden sill, staying me when I want to run over, shake you, wake you. Ask you *why*...  
  
It would have been so easy, Sam. You're the one who knows the logical necessity of pruning branches, of picking away dead buds, of pulling up weeds from the soft dirt and making sure that nothing remains of their roots so they don't sprout elsewhere and begin anew their silent work of choking what's been chosen to inhabit that ground.  
  
Couldn't you see it was happening to me? The Ring wrapped itself about my mind and even now I can still feel it there, phantom and shade. Yes, the plant is hacked away and destroyed, burned to slag, yet the tendrils and underground growth still lie there, still burrowing, still displacing what I would choose to have there.  
  
Your gardener's instincts failed you and betrayed me.  
  
It would have been so easy. To have just left me lying in the caverns of Shelob and never returned. To have just left me lying senseless along the road. A quick, merciful snap of your strong hands and it would have been done, my neck wilting sideways like a broken-stemmed flower and the blight that claimed my growth forever stilled. You could have taken the Ring the rest of the way. You had but held it a while. It would not have taken you as it did with me. You would have freed our world with one capable hand...  
  
Not nearly destroyed it, as I did.  
  
How many more times will I wish the fires had claimed me? That the scars I'll bear for the rest of my existence were truly of lasting power? Instead I have only glimmers of memories, a mirror shattered and falling about my feet and reflecting a world I once knew-a world of love, and laughter, and light. A world that does not exist any more for me.  
  
But you? The shadows lift from all of you, and you turn into the light. Your innocence is bruised, but unbroken and stronger for the testing while my own innocence has yielded, lies blooded and irredeemable in the aftermath of Mordor. The world has been preserved for you, Sam. For Merry and Pippin. For the rest of our beloved, sundered Fellowship. All of you turn with hope to this new world.  
  
But I cannot, don't you see? I see no way out. No haven to take shelter in. No small, shallow burrow to cower away from the light yet back away from the totality of darkness. I can't bear the light. I can't smell the roses beneath our window. I can't hear the sea.  
  
I'm empty. I'm hollow. I'm *dead*.  
  
You'll never understand this, Sam, and I can never tell you. I will protect you now, as tenaciously as you protected me. Even as I hate you for it, as fiercely and as undeniably as I love you.  
  
My journey has ended, yet I have somehow survived. I am still here, and I no longer know where to turn... 


	4. Sam

SAM  
  
  
  
Dusk-the seventeenth day  
  
------------------------------  
  
I was sleeping. Been sleeping too much. You should've woken me, earlier. I'm tired, surely, but no need to sleep like *that*.  
  
On the other hand, it's good to see *you* sleeping, Frodo. You're all curled up tight under the covers-are you cold, then? Here... no, your cheeks are warm, you're even sweating a little bit, so you're not cold. You just haven't been sleeping enough, I'll bet. I know you were up last night even after Merry and Pippin left, sitting up with Gandalf. I remember waking up at times and seeing the both of you there, silent as statues, and then I'd fall back asleep as if being dragged under a soft, warm cloud. I tried to stay awake, but just couldn't.  
  
It's been mighty pleasant, though, just sleeping, eating, and sitting in the sun. Just like Shire summers, eh? The gardens here are beautiful, and while I'm not quite ready to start digging about in them, it's nice to see them there, just out the window. A bit of home.  
  
I'm sure ready to see home again. I'll bet you are, too.  
  
Here, now... you're shaking. Are you dreaming? Not seen you have any nightmares, not even in the black lands. You had enough bad dreams during the day to just empty your nights of them, didn't you? But it's all done now, all finished. Hush, now. Just sleep...  
  
I sit gingerly on the bed next to you, put a hand to your back and it seems to quiet you a little. I don't worry about waking you-you know my touch better than your own. Hasn't woken you yet on this long road, has it? Not unless I wanted it to... I put my shoulders to the headboard, lean back and keep my palm to your spine. I shift a little closer, lift my legs up onto the bed and let the length of us run side by side; me all stretched out and you curled up against me. I close my eyes. Peace...  
  
Finally.  
  
Wasn't too peaceful the other day, I'll tell you that. I'd barely woke up and there you were calling me 'sleepyhead' and smiling just like old times. All that was missing was the handful of cold water you'd occasionally dribble down my chest when I was sleeping really hard-you never did play fair, you know. But wasn't it fine? That enormous meadow between the trees that you could've put the whole of Bagshot Row in. All those Big People-you know, I never thought we were that small until I came out of the Shire. Just thought the Big People were the ones who were different. But it's us, isn't it? I'm no little fellow in our own home, but I'm small in this world. And all of them there, just to see us. It made me uncomfortable, just a bit.  
  
I'm not so sure that you liked it, either.  
  
Merry and Pippin liked it, though! Grown several hands in height and now I have to look up to *both* of them! And those too-tall bodies, clad in cloaks of soft finespun and mail that shimmered like a hazy sunrise.  
  
I was so proud of them. They looked like something straight from one of old Bilbo's stories, didn't they?  
  
The muscles of your back jump beneath my fingertips. You're taut as a fence rail and about as spare. I can set my fingers in the hollows between your ribs and count the bones in your spine even through your nightshirt. You want feeding up. Get you home, get some proper hobbit food in you, none of this fancy muck that men seem to go for. Like that feast t'other night. Peacocks, I ask you. No meat on them to speak of-all they're good for is screeching and using their tail feathers to tease kittens with!  
  
What I wouldn't give for a good, thick mug of potato-leek soup about now. Two of 'em, one for each of us.  
  
Well, the main thing is we're all together again.  
  
Aren't we?  
  
I don't know what Merry and Pippin thought they were hiding. It was the first time we'd all come together-when we were conscious, anyway-but it didn't take me all that long to figure that there was something not right. Maybe we were all awkward, like tweeners who've spent the winter apart and don't know what to do for the first five minutes they're back together. Maybe they both thought we were ragged enough hurt from our own journey and wanted to spare us. Maybe it was that we were all changed, and didn't quite know how to abide the changing.  
  
I saw it in Pippin, first. He didn't bounce over and leap at me as he would have any other time. He walked carefully-Pippin careful!-and took me slowly and when I accidentally held him too tight-I didn't mean to, but I was that glad of him-he drew in his breath sharp over his teeth and then just leaned into me as if somehow he welcomed the pain. I felt the thickness of bandages under that shining mail and eased up. Sometimes I don't know my own strength, and it seemed little, unsquashable Pippin was no longer little, or unsquashable.  
  
Merry grabbed me then, said brightly that Pippin was a bit tender, he'd been under the bad end of a troll. I saw nothing wrong with Merry, but heard it, in the forced cheer of his voice. Smelled it as well as we embraced, the flat, dull sweat of exertion too soon from sickness. He didn't flinch-held as hard to me as I to him-but there was a grey pallor behind the flushed cheeks as he pushed me back, looked at me. His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn't, and I was tempted to upbraid him for keeping this distance between us, for the lie within the smile. Then the smile faded as he turned to you.  
  
And you, standing and staring at both of them, bandaged hand clenched against your belly and a thousand questions in your eyes. It was as if everything had gone silent, though I knew that folk were talking around us. 'Twas Merry that broke the odd strain; he took the last two steps and embraced you gently, so gently, as if he was afraid you would break. For a second I was afraid you might, you looked so small against his broadened frame. Then you turned your face away from me and leaned into him, that bandaged fist still lying along your stomach, and neither of you acknowledging it as if there was something, somehow, that it stirred between you. And Pippin next to me, suddenly angling against me as if he'd not the strength to hold himself up and I stood firm, steady against him as Merry held you, long and frantic, until you quivered and tried to pull back. Merry still wouldn't let go, gripping your shoulders and trying to get you to look at him, just for the moment.  
  
Instead you laid your forehead and one fist against his chest, closing your eyes.  
  
Then Pippin was edging into you both, drawing me along, drawing us all together. With an insistent, cheerful demand for attention from you he put his self-imposed hesitation into more a care for his weakened cousin than any worry about his own shakiness. If I'd not felt it myself-the creak of knitting bone, the quick wince away-I would have been fooled. You were. The weariness that had claimed your eyes lifted and warmed and you made some blithe comment about now having to look up to see whether Pippin was off to no good or not and you hugged him tightly and he didn't even wince- either because you just couldn't hold him tight enough to hurt him or he'd just made up his mind to bear it.  
  
And I bless him over and over in my head, because just with that he's somehow taken us and made us pull together again. Let others call him awkward and foolish, but I know better. His heart knows what needs to be done. Just as mine used to.  
  
Just as mine used to...  
  
Oh, Frodo, we *are* all together again. Strider-he's the King, now. He'll be a right pleasant one, too. Dressed in silks and velvets now 'stead of leather and wool, but he's still plain for all that he's gussied up. Still Strider. Legolas and Gimli, tight as ticks side by side, both of them fair shining with grace and power. I missed Boromir fiercely yesterday. No matter what had passed, he had well earned the right to see how it ended. Gandalf...  
  
I couldn't believe how incredible it was, to see him alive. To see him so changed. It came hard to me, for some reason. He wasn't the same...  
  
Of course, none of us are.  
  
Especially you. Gandalf said as much to me, pulled me aside and had a few words in my ears. Said I was to look to you very carefully. The warning light in his eyes scared me. Of course, he's always been able to turn my knees to water, but this was different. I could tell he was the one, this time, who feared. For you.  
  
They were all set to put you and me in our own rooms, but Gandalf also told me that he let them know that we were to be kept together and there was a deeper meaning in those words as well. He doesn't want you to be alone, that's plain as plain.  
  
And it's just as well, for look at you. You're still balled up under the covers against me, still trembling. I don't like this, not one bit, so I slide up underneath the blankets with you, lift you against me. You fight me for a moment, mutter, sling your head sideways; I just go with you, then angle your head against my chest. For moments it's like you're still not sure and I hope that I've not just dragged you from what sleep you can purchase, then you shudder into me, your poor ruined hand reaching up to tangle in my shirt. It's like I'm holding something made of wood instead of flesh, you're so tight, your back knotted against my belly, your jaw clenched.  
  
You still shake. I run my hands up from your jaw line to temples, rake my fingers through your hair, then go back. Again. And yet again. Slowly, ever so slowly your shakes ease and the cords in your neck start to unclench. There's silver amongst the fire-singed dark locks that fall lankly through my palms, silver I don't ever recall seeing and you're too young anyway to have this happening...  
  
And suddenly I'm clenching my fists tight in your hair, and hunching over you as from nowhere it descends and huffs the wind out of me as if someone had thrust a hard heel into my breastbone.  
  
It's silent and treacherous. It hamstrings me as surely as any knife and I can't stop it. I don't want to wake you, but I can't stop it. It spills over, runs warm and silent over my cheeks and I just sit here, bent over you, felled like a tree bitten by the axe and a literal flood of tears dripping into your hair. Misery and fear... a dark, horrible fear claims me and drops the bottom out from under me and I gather you tighter to me, hang onto you because I don't know what else to do. It's all I *know* to do anymore.  
  
Merry knew what to do, even if you were having none of it. Pippin knew what to do. But me... I don't know anymore! My heart's gone silent. It lies still-quiet within my breast, not telling me what I need to be doing here, not telling me how to help, what to do.  
  
What can I do, Frodo? What else do I need to do?  
  
Oh, everything's gone so wrong suddenly and I'm scared, do you hear me? I'm scared that we're really not all together again, that nothing can ever be the same again and that somehow the stakes have changed. Again.  
  
I don't see it anymore, the light shining from you when you sleep. It's not there. It's like that cursed Ring took it from you. Ripped the brilliance from you like it's shaded the smile on your lips and muted the song in your heart and burnished hectic the softness behind your eyes and leached the russets from those silvered strands in your forelock.  
  
No. It isn't fair. *No*. Hasn't it taken enough? It has to take this, too?  
  
I've followed you into deep and dark places that I never would have gone through alone. I've held tight to your hand and waded through a vast sea of waking, endless nightmares. But I don't know how to follow you here. I can't follow you here. I don't know where you've gone. Only that it's cold. And dark...  
  
I'm scared, Frodo. What if you don't need me, where you've gone? Is this the price I have to pay? Is this my punishment for... for...  
  
Your hand twitches, clenched in my shirt. I put my own over it gently and hold it to my heart.  
  
Merry asked me about this, you know. About your hand, how it got this way. I couldn't believe at first what he was asking me. His hesitation about you, his fear and doubt all clicked, sudden-like, and made horrible sense. I told him what had happened at Mount Doom; what that Ring had done to you, what that Slinker had done to you. His eyes changed. It was like a big weight lifted from him.  
  
I couldn't tell him the truth of it. Of what I had nearly done. I was for a moment so angry that he'd even suggested I'd take my sword to your hand, that I'd try to take the Ring from you, but not because it was so impossible. Oh, no. Not impossible...  
  
It was after Cirith Ungol. Those last days on the road. After I'd carried it. It tried to take me, you know? It tried to use me. Not just when I thought you dead in the spider's lair, but afterwards as well. There was one night I'd woken up still in the middle of a nightmare, my hands stuffing into my mouth the only thing that stopped me from screaming aloud. And when I could see again I saw you, lying so quiet and fair, that filthy Ring bruising and burning your throat. And it was as if it was talking to me, filling my mind with ugly things.  
  
I bite my lip, teeth clenching down until pain spasms there and I taste blood upon my tongue. A tiny drop falls into your hair, sets itself like a ruby amongst the tears and darkness and silver.  
  
I never, never laid a hand on you in anything other than kindness. It tried to convince me it would be a kindness, you see. It was as if you were speaking to me, pleading with me to take it from you. To take not only the Ring but the suffering from you. Mercy, it kept saying. T'would be a mercy, truly, to let you go. To help you to go...  
  
Save us all, Frodo, I didn't mean it! I didn't! And I knew, the moment I thought it, where it had came from. Not from you, never from you, but from that cursed bit of gold you were chained to. I knew it for a lie as I leaned over you and put my hands to your throat, saw the radiance that always seemed to fill you as you slept. The peace and ease that freed you, the bright, soft place you'd somehow escape to when you shut your eyes. The light that filled you-the light that *was* you.  
  
The light that's missing now.  
  
I turned away, denied the fire. I still deny it. But I can't help thinking if it did that to me, me that'd only held it for the little while I did, what did it do to you?  
  
And maybe it makes of me a coward, but I don't want to know. I just want to forget it, all of it. I want you to forget it.  
  
You've eased up against me, no longer trembling in my arms, but still it's there. The wrongness. The tension. Wherever you've gone to now, it's a place that gives you no peace and no rest.  
  
I want you to come back to me. Please, come back. I've never felt so helpless...  
  
So I lay my cheek against your skull and rock you slowly, gently, closing my burning eyes. It's too dark here, in the shadow of that mountain. It's all too close. We need to get away from here and back to where we belong. We need to go home and never seen fiery mountains or dark caverns again. We need to be in our own place, our own land, where we can have a proper smoke when we want, get six meals a day should we choose them and never again walk farther than the town square unless we want to.  
  
We just need to get you home, Frodo. That's what you need, what all of us need. We'll settle down in Crickhollow where you can hear the river run wild at night-or even better, return to Bag End where we both grew up and there's a proper garden with a bench that you can sit on and read in the sun, get some color back into your cheeks. Go climb the roof tree and watch the stars until dawn streaks the sky. Finish Bilbo's book for him. Listen to the old gammers telling tales about where we've been and what we've done-for that matter, I might even have a tale or two to add in there. Watch how Merry and Pippin will amaze everyone just as they've always done, but this time it will be because of their great height and their great skills and their even-greater hearts. Home is where we have to go, now.  
  
And our lovely, lovely Shire will fill us all up again, fill you with light and hope and life.  
  
Everything will be all right once I get you back home. It *will*... 


End file.
